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Saturday, April 06, 2013

`A Comfortable Account in a Swiss Bank'

Forty-four
years after it first aired, a friend has been watching Civilization, Sir Kenneth Clark’s thirteen-part BBC documentary on the
history of Western art and architecture since the Middle Ages. What strikes her
forcibly about the show is Clark’s casual erudition and his willingness to pass
judgment on the works he discusses. “He knows there’s standards. It’s not just about
his opinion,” she said. I never watched the show but the timing is interesting.
By 1969, the barbarians had breached the walls and were pitching tents. I
graduated from high school the following year and one of my English teachers
dates the collapse of Western Civilization to about 1970, judging by the illiteracy of her students.

From
the library I borrowed Clark’s The Nude: A
Study in Ideal Form (1956) and the first volume of his autobiography, Another Part of the Wood (1974), and started
reading the latter. Clark was born in London in 1903, a very foreign place and
time but one that echoes sympathetically in odd corners of Texas in 2013. He spends much time remembering the books he
read as a boy and a young man. In the first chapter, “An Edwardian Childhood,” he names the Golliwog volumes
of Florence and Bertha Upton, and Beatrix Potter’s books, specifically The Tailor of Gloucester, which I
remember reading. Clark says he preferred it to the tales of Hans Christian
Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, which frightened him. They frightened
me too, but that’s precisely why I enjoyed them. Clark writes:

"Perhaps
the born story-teller (like Dickens) feels impelled to hold his hearer’s
attention by frightening him, and the teller of children’s tales, knowing that
his audience is fickle and fidgety, lays on the horrors more abundantly. Or do
the majority of people really like being frightened?”

Clark
studied Latin and recalls an aide-mémoire
used to remember the gender of nouns. He calls it a “distych which any writer
should take to heart”: “Masculine will always be / Things that you can touch
and see.” He comments: “Perhaps these lines were the foundation of my distaste
for the stellar nebulae of literature—Shelley, and St John Perse.” I cheered as
I read that and again as I transcribed it. In passing he mentions Waugh’s Decline and Fall andRuskin’s Praeterita, and
says: “A strong, catholic response to works of art is like a comfortable
account in a Swiss bank. One can never become emotionally bankrupt.” He is
moved by The Return of the Native,
enjoys The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and
Heart of Darkness, and bored by The Egoist – all appropriate responses.
He adds:

“But
even at that age I was no novel reader. I suppose most young people read novels
as a short cut to growing up. By living other people’s lives they achieve
vicarious experience. I did not want experience of life. I wanted information.
So what I valued most in the bookcase was the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

I
wanted both – experience of life and information – and have never found them
inconsistent. As a young man, Clark wished to become both a painter and
a writer, until reading an article by the novelist Arnold Bennett who suggested
that “if an Englishman felt himself equally drawn to painting and writing he
should not hesitate: he should write.” He says:

“To
be a writer one must read. What did I read? Chiefly poetry.”

Clark
discovered he had little interest in the Romantics and that his favorite period
of English poetry was the seventeenth century, “not only Milton, but Donne
Marvell, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw and even dear old Herrick. Vaughan was my
favorite, and I could never understand why my teachers preferred Herbert.”

Never
stuffy, hidebound or predictable in his tastes, Clark says his next favorite
among schools of poets are the Chinese of the ninth century “as rendered into
English by Arthur Waley.” What delightful company Clark makes. Of Waley he
writes:

“What
a world he opened to us; an appreciation of nature that we thought had been
discovered by Rousseau and Wordsworth; a self-knowledge that we thought had
been discovered by Montaigne; a feeling for the delicacy of human relationships
within the complex structure of society that we thought was the invention of
Proust, until we read the Lady Murasaki; all revealed to us by that silent,
self-effacing scholar-poet.”